Often with remodeling, we’ll get an inquiry and it will be a wife who wants her kitchen remodeled and she’ll be the one spearheading this. She’ll be asking the questions and she is the one that we meet with but she’s probably not the only decision maker. Her husband is another decision maker and in many cases the primary decision maker but he’s not the one that you’re actually talking to. In sales, this is why it’s one of the common questions that you’ll get on every checklist. You simply need to ask, “Who are the decision-makers?”

The reason you want to know is because you’re gonna require their buy-in in order to make the sale. If you don’t have the buy-in of all the decision-makers or the most important decision maker, then there’s just no way that this deal is going to progress down the line. Let’s talk about buy-in for a second. What exactly am I talking about? Today, I was talking with a couple of people and the third decision-maker, who is the primary decision-maker, was not there. I knew what the priorities were for these two guys but I didn’t know the exact priorities of the main decision maker and so this is one of the questions I asked. Eventually, I’m going to have to speak with this person because I need to know for sure what their priorities are.

Now, how does this relate to selling a remodel? It’s very simple and it’s very powerful. If you’re not doing this already, you should absolutely be doing this. When you are meeting with a couple, if it’s a husband and wife decision-makers, you want to meet with both of them. You should try to meet with both of them. When you walk through their kitchen, you want to spend a lot of time pulling out of them their priorities, and things they care about in their new kitchen. Maybe the wife wants a really nice gas range and a farm sink but the husband really cares more about the refrigerator. You need to find out all these things and figure out what the most important things are for each person.

Once you do that, then everything that you propose moving forward, probably giving an estimate or a verbal proposal or both, or whatever plan that you propose moving forward, needs to address directly the priorities of each person. If you can come up with a plan that includes the really nice range, the farm sink, and the exact fridge that they want, and you should be talking about things that matter the most to them.

On the flip side, if you create an estimate or a proposal and it is a full kitchen remodel but you don’t address specifically those wants and needs of those people, then the deal isn’t likely to move forward. Figure out who the decision-makers are. Make sure they’re both there when you’re meeting with them. Get to the bottom of their real priorities, the most important things to them, and then frame everything moving forward based on those priorities. If you do that, you’ll make more sales.

I don’t know about you, but like cell phone calls, and emails and the level of spam has really picked up in the last year. It’s the same thing happening on Google. I know a lot of people that buy leads from Angie, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and all of those and over the last year, the lead quality has just been plummeting. It’s the same thing with Google. So I think there’s just a ton of spam going on and when you advertise on Google Search and you’re bidding on keywords you’re opening yourself up to the world. Any robot, any computer can do a Google Search and see your Ad and click on it. Every time they click on it you have to pay for that. And sometimes you’re paying $100 or even $200 just for something or someone to click.

Google is trying to get rid of some of those bad clicks but it can’t deal with all of them. And there’s been multiple campaigns that I’ve run where, when I dig deep into the metrics and I look at what’s going on, and it’s clear to me that the majority of “people” or robots clicking on our Ads are not actual people.

So what have I been doing? My clients need leads, they need new customers coming in. What I’ve done is I’ve pivoted and started using Facebook Ads more. I used to hate Facebook Ads I’m still not a huge fan of Facebook as a platform. I don’t spend a lot of time on it personally but business-wise it is really fruitful for a lot of companies. One reason is when you use Facebook Ads, you’re not opening yourself up to the world like you are with Google Search Ads. Like I said with Google Search Ads, you bid on a keyword, and anybody and everybody can search for that keyword and click on your Ad. But the Facebook algorithm specifically selects people to show your Ad to. And so people don’t choose to see your Ad, therefore, you’re not open up to be found by just anybody. So you get a lot higher quality of people or entities looking at your Ads. So when you do get leads through Facebook they’re generally real people. Where with Google we’re getting a lot of crap lately.

Now before you just go bail on Google Ads and switch to Facebook you have to understand that the game is very different. With Google Ads, you’re bidding on keywords which means somebody searched for whatever you’re bidding on and hopefully you’re bidding on something that’s going to lead somebody to buy from you. And so that’s a different kind of marketing and is called search marketing. People are searching for these things, you sell these things so you put yourself in front of them.

With Facebook it’s different, people aren’t searching for you when they see you on Facebook. You’re kind of asserting yourself in their point of view and so your approach has to be a lot different. You have to have a really good offer. The Facebook Ads I run are not complicated. You can do videos and all these crazy things, I literally do a picture and one sentence, and that one sentence is really what matters. I aim to offer them something they want but that is also something that they can’t just get by going to Google and searching for it.

So, an example could be windows installed in your home for half the price. That’s a really great offer for anybody who’s in the market to replace the windows in their house. And if someone’s browsing Facebook and they happen to be in the market for that and they see that offer they would be stupid not to click on it and find out more. So that’s the kind of offer that works well. For construction remodeling, if you have immediate availability that could be a good offer. Because there are a lot of people that are 12 or 24 months in line with a company to get their project done. If someone comes along and says, “Hey, we can start your project next week”, that’s something that they might be willing to detract from whatever they’re doing on Facebook and actually go and become a lead for you.

So, those are the kinds of things that work on Facebook. It can be difficult to come up with offers but really the question you have to answer is, “What is something I can offer that people would feel dumb saying no to?”. If you can find something that works then Facebook Ads can be extremely lucrative for you. And also, the Facebook algorithm these days is so good at knowing what’s going on with people. Facebook knows if somebody’s in the market to buy windows or if someone’s in the market for a remodel. Facebook knows this stuff, they’re watching everything this person does, they’re watching who they contact all that kind of stuff. So, aligning your advertising with Facebook’s algorithm and letting Facebook decide who to show your ad to works really well these days.

That’s what I did, I said okay and we started the account and it all got set up automatically and that’s the first thing I don’t really like about it. It’s all automated. You don’t really have any control over anything. All you get to do is control your daily budget and this might have changed, but this is how it was back then. You create your daily budget but they extrapolate that to your monthly budget. I was advertising with them then a month went by. I logged in, checked it and nothing happened. I had like a few clicks. It costs like $20. I was like, okay, let it go. Another month, I put it on my calendar to check it. Went in to check it out and the same thing. It was like eight clicks or something.

In the second month, I spent another $20 and so I spent just $40 out of the $300 in the first two months. I was thinking, okay this is really slow. Let me set my calendar for two months from now because it’s just going so slow. Well, I log in two months later and the spend was like $800. It went from barely getting any clicks at all to just getting tons of clicks. I didn’t notice because I didn’t get any leads or anything from it. I don’t really know where they were sending people to or what really was going on. All I know is that I had to spend another $500 of my own money very unexpectedly. I contacted them and they weren’t really helpful and that just left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m not saying that Yelp doesn’t work because I do know some people that it works for. That was just my own experience. I didn’t really like how I didn’t have any control over what was going on and I didn’t like their response when I was an unhappy customer. They basically just told me to just deal with it and we’re not going to do anything for you. That is what it is. That’s my experience. Now, I do have one customer who gets somewhat consistent projects through Yelp. They used to be spending a few thousand a month. I think they spent $1000 a month now and you can’t deny that it’s bringing people to him. We saw a big improvement or increasing the number of people coming from Yelp and all sources when we rebuilt their website and made it look a lot more professional and that’s one thing.

With construction in particular, like remodeling, additions, bigger construction, and more costly projects, people aren’t just going to see an Ad and become a lead. Very rarely does that happen and if it does happen, it’s almost a red flag. Because people are serious about doing big projects like this, they do their due diligence upfront. People shop online for everything these days including contractors. If they find you on Yelp or Facebook or anywhere, they’re gonna go to Google. They’re gonna type in the name of your company and they’re going to look and vet you a little bit. That’s what we saw with this company. They’ve been getting a steady flow of people, and visitors from Yelp, and we saw a huge improvement or increase in the number of actual leads from Yelp and all sources when we improved the website. Now, that’s the good thing. The bad thing is you know this customer has noticed over the years that the quality of his Yelp advertising is going down. He showed me the other day, that he looked through the Yelp page and we did a demo search as if we were one of his customers. Even though he’s paying a lot of money every month, he’s on this really long list of contractors because there are just tons of people advertising on Yelp. Even if you go to his Yelp page, there are still other contractors being advertised to that person on your own yelp page.

I guess it’s just getting a little saturated in a lot of places where you don’t get what you used to get for the same amount of money. That’s a common trend in all advertising. It’s just getting more expensive and the quality of it is going down and that’s kind of all I have to say about Yelp. If you’re thinking about it, it doesn’t hurt to have a free Yelp page. Anyone can go make a free Yelp listing. Put pictures on it and get a few reviews on it. Make yourself look good because I said people are going to vet you. They’re going to type the name, your company into Google, they’re going to look at those things. They might click on your Yelp page so you want that to look professional. It doesn’t need to be amazing but it needs to be as good as you can make it in a reasonable amount of time Just be aware that if you do create your free Yelp listing, Yelp salespeople are going to be calling you trying to upgrade or sell you on their advertising. Just tell them you don’t want to do it and that’s it. You don’t have to feel obligated to do anything, and they’ll use different sales tactics to try to get you to do it. But it’s not a big deal.

If you do decide to try it, two things: one, make them give you a credit. Make them show you it works before you put your own money into it and don’t sign any long-term contracts. Then the other thing is, if you when you try it, track the results extremely closely. You need to know exactly how many phone calls you get, how many contact forms, how many website visitors, how many actual good leads you get, how many meetings you get, how many estimates you put out, how many jobs you get, and how much money you made from it. You want to know all those things in detail.

In reality, you want to be tracking that stuff for all of your marketing. Because if you track that stuff for a couple of months and then you can just look at it and say okay this Yelp compares to this other way of getting customers exactly like this. You want to know the numbers. If you don’t know the numbers, you’re just going to be sitting around wondering, is this working? Is it not working? I hate paying for it but it might be worth it. You don’t want to be wondering, this is business, it’s numbered, and it’s about making money and making people happy. If you’re sitting around wondering what’s going on and if it’s worth it, that’s because you’re not tracking things close enough.

We were working on this pergola that was built off the side of this house that’s up above the water. This house is right on the lake and we had to assemble a bunch of scaffolding we used ledger locks, like six-inch ledger locks, to hold these planks onto the scaffolding. It was a rainy cold day and my dad told my friend, I’ll try not to mention him by name because I don’t want to embarrass him, but he told him to go disassemble the scaffolding and to save all the ledger locks because ledger locks are really expensive.

My friend comes back to my dad about two hours later and he hands him this handful of ledger locks and they’re all just twisted up and mangled and bent to a 90 degree and just ruined. My dad’s like “How did you do this?”. Apparently, he took a nail bar and he pried apart all the ledger locks and that’s why it took him two hours. He was so tired, winded and it was just one of those things that are really, “Why didn’t you just use a screw gun to take this apart?”.

That’s the story. I think we always get a good laugh at it about once a year whenever somebody brings it up. You know, sometimes people really surprise you with the things that they do.

Now, here’s what I’m talking about. When somebody calls you and they’re trying to reach a business and you just pick up the phone and you’re like, “Hello??”, that doesn’t come off very professional. What you want to do is at a bare minimum let people know who they’ve reached.

When people call me I say, “Hello this is Chuck”, and that way I let them know who they’ve reached. Otherwise, you have to ask, “hello is this Jason?”, or whatever. And I just have realized that after calling so many of you, if you answer the phone and you don’t tell me who I’m talking to then I have to ask. It just makes the conversation a little weird.

If I’m calling a business, then I expect somebody to answer the phone as a business. Or if I’m calling a specific person but I’ve never called them before I expect them to let me know that I’ve called the right person.

So, if you carry a phone with you and this is your business line and you have potential customers or other companies, vendors, whatever calling you, just make sure that you introduce yourself when you answer your phone. Otherwise, people are going to think they got the wrong number and that’s not good for your business.

So, many years ago, I was bidding for a kitchen remodel. I think the bid came out from $60k to $70k. And, we didn’t end up getting that job. I circled back around with that person and I just approached them and I wanted to find out why didn’t we get that job. It turns out that we bid too low. This guy had it in his mind that he wanted a $100k kitchen and we only bid $70k. And so, in his mind, he wasn’t getting the contractor for him and he ended up going with someone else that had a higher bid. And that’s the opposite of what most people think happens. Most contractors I talk to are always knocking the price down. They come out with an estimate, and they’re like “Oh man, that’s a lot of money, I really want this job, let’s cut some costs here.” They’re always trying to make the bid lower. But sometimes that’s the opposite of what you need to do for a certain client.

So, what I propose is having different levels to give people options. We do this all the time in the web design and marketing industry. It’s really hard to get a website proposal where you don’t have different options. Usually, I have three tiers. You’ll have a high, a low, and a mid-tier. And you can do the same thing with your remodeling or building estimates. You can have two or three options. But, let’s say you’re pricing a kitchen remodel, maybe you have one option that’s got all the most high-end finishes that you can offer and that’s the high price. And then, you’ve got the budget price which is the low one where you’re just doing the bare minimum. And then you’ve got the mid-mid range which is exactly what the client said they wanted.

This way when somebody looks at these things, their psychology goes into pricing things. This is the same as when you go to like a store or high-end boutique or something like that. They’ll always have like something at one price sitting right next to something with a price that’s like five times higher. Then, when you look at that five times higher price and you’re like, “That’s really expensive!”, and now all of a sudden the other price looks really attractive. It’s the same thing with your estimates.

It’s like having a $100k kitchen remodel priced sitting next to a $70k kitchen remodel and you also got a $50k which is like the bare minimum. It doesn’t have everything that they asked for but that’s like the bare minimum. Now they’ve got some things to compare it to and that mid-grade $70k kitchen remodel is looking pretty good right now. That’s because it’s not a hundred thousand dollars but it’s also not the cheapest option. That way, people feel like they’re getting a good deal but they’re also getting all the things that they want. And occasionally you’ll have that person that wants the best of the best of the best all the time and one way they determine if it’s the best is that it’s the most expensive. So by having that super expensive option, you’re not pricing yourself out of getting those clients who only want the high-end stuff like I did that one time.

1. Nobody knows that you exist.

Lack of awareness. You could be the best contractor in the world, you could be the best salesman in the world but if nobody knows you exist then no one can possibly hire you, right? So how do you you make sure people know that you exist?

One way is promoting yourself. If you are a one-man show or you’re just the head of your company and you’re the only person that’s going to be able to promote your company then that has to be one of your main priorities. You can use business cards, road signs or yard signs, logos on your truck, t-shirts, and have a website as well as be on Google maps. Being in places where people look online is critical.

You can even be asking your customers, “Hey, do you know anybody that needs my services?”. You have to be promoting yourself, if you don’t have any work coming in or if you don’t even have any opportunities coming in then promotion is where your efforts need to be.

2. You don’t respond fast enough when people reach out.

So, this is one of the most common ones I see and it makes sense and I’ve been there before. You’re on the job and you’re working, you’re getting phone calls but you don’t want to be answering your phone all the time but that’s probably costing you jobs. Especially if you need work. You should be answering the phone and you should be calling people back right away or should be texting them if they don’t answer and leaving voicemails. You have to be very persistent in order to get through to people.

The moment that someone finds you online or whatever and they reach out to you that’s the moment to strike. If you call them back an hour later, they’re probably in a different headspace. Maybe they’re at work, maybe they’re picking their kids up whatever. That might not be the right time to talk about it for them. So if you only call them back one time and you never hear from them again the mistake is on your part. You need to be calling them back until you reach them. The best thing to do is just to answer as soon as they call.

3. You don’t follow up.

This goes hand in hand with the last one. If somebody doesn’t answer, you gotta keep calling them. Call, text, email… Do everything you can to get through to them. Then, after you give someone an estimate, you follow up with them. If I need work, I’ll be following up with them every single week. Giving them a call, shooting an email, shooting them a text asking if they have any questions. Asking where they’re at in the decision-making process. Letting them know that I haven’t forgotten about them and that I want to do their job.

You have to find a balance with this but if you’re afraid of annoying someone or afraid of coming off desperate, that’s not a good reason. If you need work you should be following up with people. There have been times where I follow up with somebody after like six months and they actually thank me for following up and then they hire me. So, follow-up is just part of the sales game. Statistically, it takes seven follow-ups to reach the average lead, the average prospect and that’s across many industries. But the point is the sale is in the follow-up. So if you’re not following up now you better start doing it.

4. You’re bidding too low or too high.

Bidding too high that’s an obvious one, right? There are a lot of contractors out there who purposely knock down their bids because they feel like it’s too expensive and they really want the work. I advise against that. When you bid on projects you should be bidding on them based on cost and then the margin that you want to make on it. Straight across! You shouldn’t be lowering bids or lowering prices on every bid or estimate just because you’re afraid of not getting the job. And sometimes it’s possible to bid too low.

Believe it or not, there are people out there who have a budget in their mind and are really high-end clients. They know what they want and if you come back with a bid that they feel is too low, they’re just going to assume that maybe you don’t really know what you’re doing. Or maybe they wanted a $100k kitchen, not a $50k kitchen. So, it is possible to bid too low that’s why I highly recommend having a scientific approach to bidding.

You run out all your costs, you add your markup so that you can get the margin and the profit that you want and that’s the price, plain and simple. If somebody pushes back on you, you have a solid foundation on which to hold your ground and say that’s the price take it or leave it.

5. You’re coming off as unprofessional.

This could be tied in with any of the other things that I just said. If you show up in an old beater truck with no logos or in just a regular rag-tag shirt on and you’re 15 minutes late but you didn’t call to let them know that you were late… And, for example, if it took them a week to get a hold of you. then you’ve already kind of lost the job at that point unless this person has no other options.

So, it’s super important to pay attention to all the details. Always come off as professional and be consistent about it. It should just become who you are. You answer the phone, you return calls right away, and you always show up on time if you can’t show up on time you let them know ahead of time. You get their estimates in the amount of time that you say you will. Your estimates must be priced right. All of those things put together will give people a good feeling about you. If they have a bad feeling about you, if you come off as unprofessional, they’re not going to hire you no matter what. So, you might be losing the game before you even get started.

The last one, I know I said five but this one’s really important and I think a lot of contractors just never think about this. And that is that you’re going after the wrong customers. Who is your ideal customer? When you look back at all the people you’ve ever worked for, think about who are your favorites and why are they your favorites.

I suggest getting out of pen and paper and listing out the reasons why you really liked working for them or you really like doing those jobs. And then go after those kinds of clients. Be willing to say no to clients that don’t fit the situation that you want because every job that you take has an opportunity cost. If you take one job you’re saying no to another one. And even if you’re feeling a little desperate don’t let that dictate your decisions all the time. Because figuring out who you really want to work with and finding ways to work with more of those kinds of people or on more of those types of projects will eventually transform your business into something that is really awesome. And that makes you the money you want and that has you doing the things that you want to do.

So the first thing he said was my google ads do not work like before I get clicks on youtube now and I don’t have a youtube channel and I’m wondering if I’m getting clicks tied to other platforms because I’m listed with HomeAdvisor platforms and related ones but not google search anymore. Now, my company runs google ads for companies across the country and I’ve noticed in the last year so a huge decline in the performance of google ads. It might be related to the fact that there’s more spam happening these days.

Pretty much anywhere on the internet, you’re encountering more spam but especially on google because anybody can do a search and see your ad and click on it and since you have to pay for that, you notice those clicks and I’ve just noticed a lot in the last year that a lot of those clicks appear to be spam. They appear to be fake because we can see in google analytics how long someone spends on the website, what buttons they click on stuff like that. And we’ve noticed that an overwhelming majority of the people clicking on those ads spend zero seconds on the website they don’t click on any pages like it just looks like bs traffic.

And so, you can see if you’re getting a bunch of crappy fake clicks then you’re wasting your budget on those, That’s not surprising.
I’ve been noticing the same thing about showing up on youtube. I think this person’s running display ads which are google’s, you know, if you’re on a website or something, you see those little ads everywhere and those are google display ads. So, if you’re doing that, then google’s just gonna put you all over the internet so that’s that might be where those are coming from.

Then he goes on to say isn’t it unfair to have multiple lead companies with virtually all leads going to HomeAdvisor and Angie and these companies are making it hard for the small guy to advertise because they dominate the ad space and they seem to have a monopoly. This is something I’ve been saying for a while now and it’s really frustrating and it was frustrating to me six years ago as just a regular contractor trying to market my company because I noticed even back then that the whole google search page was full of HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List and Houzz and Thumbtack and all these companies. It was making it really hard for me to get my company to show up and these days it’s even worse.

What he then says is I did some research and all these ads are coming from and are owned by a company called Ad Practitioner projects LLC and so what he’s talking about if you do a search for like I don’t know ex. bathroom remodel in your city, it is most likely one of the top ads you see are going to be this a company called Pal and Sons and Pal and Sons, if you click on it it’s just a page with a picture of this guy and his two sons and there’s a form and it says that they’re voted best in this city. If you fill out that form, your contact information gets sold to Angie leads and Angie Leads sells it to contractors and you’ll be getting calls from people that got your information through Angie Leads.

I actually called and talked to this guy and he’s discovered other companies like Pal and Sons and this is not a real company. It’s just meant to look like a real company. He’s found other ones there’s one called like Jensen brothers or Jensen and bros or something like that and basically what this guy discovered on his own and is something I’ve been looking into for a while is that there are all these websites across the internet where all these companies running ads on google and all over the place and if you fill out the form on any of these websites or ads your co your information ends up with Angie Leads or you know one of those companies. It’s like all roads lead to Angie, no matter where you are on the internet your stuff is, it’s going to them and if you do that google search now bathroom remodel in your city, you’re likely to see Angie Leads, HomeAdvisor over and over and over again. They’re running ads and they’re in the organic search and you’ve got Pal and Sons, Jensen bros and they’re all roads lead to Angie. You can say that they’re monopolizing the front page of Google and that’s exactly what they’re doing and it’s really it’s just frustrating. It was frustrating to me when I was just a contractor and it’s frustrating to me now as a marketer that works for contractors and the only way around it that I’ve been able to find so far is Google Maps.

That’s the one place that these companies can’t monopolize and luckily at least, for now, that’s where consumers are looking because consumers are catching on to this too. People don’t want to use Angie Leads anymore and if you read through the comments on some of my videos you’ll see homeowners coming on to say that. They’re having a bad experience this way and that they filled out a form somewhere and had a bunch of contractors calling them and all this stuff. I’m just trying to get the word out to you that it’s difficult uh as a contractor who doesn’t have time to research this stuff and go through trial and error.

It’s difficult to know what to do and it’s easy to be preyed upon by these companies that will call you over and over again and try to sell you this dream. This is what’s going on in the current state of the online space for home services and so if you watch this far you’re probably concerned about this or you’ve experienced some of this crap before. All I can say is get on Google Maps. Get your profile made, get reviews on that and at least for now, that is the one place that you can show up as a local business where you don’t have to compete with these national companies.

You don’t have to compete with all these other companies that are crowding out real businesses and selling leads to HomeAdvisor and I hope that’s helpful. If you have anything to add to this please throw in the comments, if you have any information you want me to check out I’d love to learn more about this and hear your experience.

First of all, what are we talking about here? Paid traffic? Organic traffic? What is traffic? In this regard, we’re talking about website visitors or people on the internet coming to your web properties whether it’s a social media page or a website or whatever it happens to be. Every person that comes through could be considered traffic that’s what the marketing term is for it. So that’s what we’re talking about, we’re talking about your website visitors.

So, paid one is the easiest one to explain. Paid means that you paid to get that person to your website whether it’s through Google advertising or Facebook ads. Even paying for Yelp or you buying leads from HomeAdvisor could be considered paid traffic. So all of those kinds of things are paid, I mean you’re literally paying for that person to come to check you out.

Organic is when people find you on their own. Maybe not on their own but it’s when you had nothing to do with it. So if one of your clients refers one of their friends or family to you, that’s organic. If somebody is searching online through Google and they find your website on their own, that’s organic.

So, that’s what we’re talking about paid versus organic. Which one is better for your contracting or construction business? Now that depends on your situation, if you need a job this month or you’re going to go out of business then paid traffic is going to be better because you can get it instantly. You can make a deal with Google, and pay them to send people to your website. Within a couple of hours, you could have people visiting your website.

Now, that’s gonna get pretty expensive really quick and that’s just the way it goes. Advertising on Google and Facebook and things like that work on a bid system. If “Joe Construction” down the street is willing to spend $50 dollars every time somebody clicks on his ad then if you want to show up above him on Google, you gotta bid more than that, you gotta spend $51 per click. And over time everybody’s trying to outbid each other and that causes the price of clicks to go up quite a bit. I’ve seen the price per click on Google over $200 for just a click and also as low as like 50 cents.

So, again, it varies but that’s a simple explanation. Paid traffic is very fast but it’s also very expensive. And one downside of paid traffic is when you stop paying, you stop playing. So you’re running Google Ads you’re getting jobs from it, if you stop paying you have zero. You have nothing to show for it, there are no dividends, there are no residual effects, there’s nothing. It’s just you stop paying, you stop playing.

Organic on the flip side, it’s not instant. It always takes time for the organic stuff to happen. It’s kind of like growing a garden. Not to relate that to the organic term because it has nothing to do with that. But, when you build a website that people can find on Google on their own without you having to pay for it that can be very lucrative. Because, if a lot of people are finding you they’re finding you on their own which makes them value you more than if you just paid to show up in front of their faces. You’re not paying to play.

So once you’re there, these people are finding you week after week month after month. You’ll have people coming to your business to hire you. And that’s why I think organic is better if you’re in this for the long term. If you’re not going to go out of business in a couple of months, if you don’t get jobs today, then you should definitely be investing in your organic marketing, and organic traffic. Because over time that will be the most profitable source of customers.

And you know, let’s just talk about money for a minute. Let’s say you have $5,000 to spend on marketing. If you want to do Google advertising and you’re going to run the ads yourself and do it all yourself you can get like two or three months of Google ads with that $5,000. And then hopefully get enough jobs and process enough jobs to get you at least your $5,000 back but hopefully, it will bring two or three times that, by the end of the two or three months.

Now with organic, you spend that same $5,000 and you might not make your money back until two or three months. If you’re lucky, sometimes it takes longer and it can take up to six months. It’s kind of split in half, I’m not going to get too far into that now but some of our customers get results literally overnight we’ve had a bunch of those. But for others, it takes like six months or more for them to really pick up steam and for people to find them organically.

And so, let’s make it six months, so if you were doing ads for six months that’d be $10,000 over the course of six months. With the organic side, you just spend the $5,000 on getting established making it so people can find you on Google. And by the end of the six months, you will have seen pretty good profit. At least recouped your $5,000! But then by the end of the year, you still have that same initial $5,000 investment but you’re making that money every month. And so you might have a four-to-one return on your investment by the end of the year.

Whereas with Google Ads, you’re going to have to keep making that investment every month to get those clients. And so both means can be profitable and the bigger companies that want to scale they use both of these. They make sure that they’re getting organic customers but they also pay to get customers because they want more.

If you’re a small company and you don’t need a lot of customers organic is going to be the way for you to go because it’s just so much more sustainable. And if something happens, if times get rough but you still have those customers finding you every month, then that’s a lot easier to manage than if you have to keep spending thousands of dollars every month just to keep the wheels turning.

So just like with investing, you know with marketing it’s best to be diversified but in my opinion, organic is always better than paid as long as you’re not in a situation where you’re going to go out of business in the next month or two.

If you turn off or turn on the tv you’ll see everybody is talking about the recession, some people are even calling it a depression. “Recession is coming…recession is coming!” I think if you actually look at the definition of a recession and you look at what’s going on you’ll see that recession is already here and it’s been here for a little bit.

And the last time we had this kind of recession around 2008 my family’s remodeling company was not prepared. We only had one way of acquiring new customers and that was referrals and repeat business. We had no control over that whatsoever, it was completely dependent upon our past customers either hiring us again or referring us to others. There was not a lot we could do to make this happen when we wanted to make it happen because of this when the recession hit, business dried up. We didn’t have any customers coming in, and the phone wasn’t ringing.

We were really lucky to end up being contracted by a big bank that was going around buying foreclosed homes. It wasn’t a fun job to do. I mean sometimes it was kind of fun but we were going into these houses where people had been squatting for months or years and having to clean up their mess. And let me tell you when people know that they’re going to be moving out of a house that they’re not responsible for and they don’t have to pay for they trash the place. It’s pretty disgusting some of the stuff that we had to clean up. But anyway, we did that for like one to two years and it wasn’t very profitable but it kept food on my family’s table which was what was important.

We learned a valuable lesson from that, the let one lesson is to diversify your marketing strategy. Have more than one way that customers can come in and find your business and work with you. And so back then all we had was referrals and repeat customers and we still have that today. Almost our entire schedule right now is full for like two to three years of repeat business and referrals.

But, when the economy tightens up more and times get really tough that channel might dry up and so this time we’re prepared. We have a really good website and we are on Google Maps and those two channels bring in a whole bunch of customers. Right now we even have our contact forms on our website turned off because we don’t want more customers. But let me tell you as soon as things start to slow down we’ll be turning them things back on. We might even start running advertising on Google and Facebook.

Another thing that we’ve done is we have partnerships around the city where we live. We have contractors that we work with all the time and we send each other work. So that’s another channel we have now that we didn’t have before. The reason I’m telling you all this is because I want to emphasize how important it is to diversify your marketing strategy. It’s just like an investment. If you have investments or if you go to a financial planner they’re going to tell you to diversify your assets. Maybe you have a house, you have some vehicles maybe you have some like gold and silver, you’re in the stock market, you have some bonds, whatever. They tell you to diversify your investments so that if any one of those takes a dive in value you’re somewhat protected by being so spread out. And it’s the same thing with your business and marketing.

When you invest in marketing you’re making an investment in your future. If you’re diversified in the ways that people can find you then you’re more likely to be able to keep acquiring customers when the economy tightens up and things get tougher. So like I said the things that we have in place now that we didn’t before, we have our website, we are on Google Maps, and advertising on Google and Facebook. We have partnerships around town. We still have friends and family sending us customers. We have a lot more branding around, we have shirts, we have hats, we have signs that go on the road as well as truck signs, and a whole bunch
of things that we didn’t have back then.

We fully expect to slow down but we still expect to be acquiring customers. All of those companies in our area that are not as prepared as us, they’re more likely to go out of business sooner. So even though the pool of customers is going to shrink, the pool of service providers is going to shrink as well. There’s never not going to be a need for remodeling and working on homes or yards or any of these services that we all provide they’re always going to be needed. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to diversify the way that customers come to your business so that you can survive or hopefully even thrive when this stuff hits the fan. So tell me what are you going to be doing when this economic cluster happens?